in song and prided themselves upon doing honour to women and to the successful warriors of their tribe.  Brief, the object of Arab life was to be—­to be free, to be brave, to be wise; while the endeavours of other peoples was and is to have—­to have wealth, to have knowledge, to have a name; and while moderns make their “epitome of life” to be, to do and to suffer.  Lastly the Arab’s end was honourable as his life was stirring:  few Badawin had the crowning misfortune of dying “the straw-death.”

The poetical forms in The Nights are as follows:—­The Misra’ah or hemistich is half the “Bayt” which, for want of a better word, I have rendered couplet:  this, however, though formally separated in MSS., is looked upon as one line, one verse; hence a word can be divided, the former part pertaining to the first and the latter to the second moiety of the distich.  As the Arabs ignore blank verse, when we come upon a rhymeless couplet we know that it is an extract from a longer composition in monorhyme.  The Kit’ah is a fragment, either an occasional piece or more frequently a portion of a Ghazal (ode) or Kasidah (elegy), other than the Matla, the initial Bayt with rhyming distichs.  The Ghazal and Kasidah differ mainly in length:  the former is popularly limited to eighteen couplets:  the latter begins at fifteen and is of indefinite number.  Both are built upon monorhyme, which appears twice in the first couplet and ends all the others, e g., aa + ba + ca, etc.; nor may the same assonance be repeated, unless at least seven couplets intervene.  In the best poets, as in the old classic verse of France, the sense must be completed in one couplet and not run on to a second; and, as the parts cohere very loosely, separate quotation can generally be made without injuring their proper effect.  A favourite form is the Ruba’i or quatrain, made familiar to English ears by Mr. Fitzgerald’s masterly adaptation of Omar-i-Khayyam:  the movement is generally aa + ba, but it also appears as ab + cb, in which case it is a Kit’ah or fragment.  The Murabba, tetrastichs or four fold-song, occurs once only in The Nights (vol.i. 98); it is a succession of double Bayts or of four lined stanzas rhyming aa + bc + dc + ec:  in strict form the first three hemistichs rhyme with one another only, independently of the rest of the poem, and the fourth with that of every other stanza, e.g., aa + ab + cb + db.  The Mukhammas, cinquains or pentastichs (Night cmlxiv.), represents a stanza of two distichs and a hemistich in monorhyme, the fifth line being the “bob” or burden:  each succeeding stanza affects a new rhyme, except in the fifth line, e.g., aaaab + ccccb + ddddb and so forth.  The Muwwal is a simple popular song in four to six lines; specimens of it are given in the Egyptian grammar of my friend the late Dr. Wilhelm Spitta.[FN#444] The Muwashshah, or ornamented verse, has two main divisions:  one applies to our acrostics in which the initials form